The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates
By Daniel Golden
Crown Publishers, 25.95
I'm shocked, shocked that access to higher education can be skewed to the rich and mighty. That children born with silver spoons in their mouths can receive preferential treatment in college admissions. That gifted and well-connected athletes have advantages (especially if they play squash or row crew). That high-powered universities suffer from endowment envy and hustle those of fatted wallet to boost their portfolios and profiles. That faculty kids can get a free ride while their immigrant peers can get the shaft. Who knew?
Daniel Golden, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal, professes not to have known these facts of life. To cover his ignorance, he cites Alexis de Tocqueville's observation in "Democracy in America" (1835) that meritocracy ruled in the frontier-rough United States as it never would in courtly Europe; in the new republic, the French aristocrat predicted, smarts would always trump money.
Yet we've long known that de Tocqueville's claim about democracy's inherent meritocratic impulse was as inaccurate when he wrote it as it is today; generations of social critics, from Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills to E. Digby Baltzell and Richard Pessen, have demolished this delusion. Alas for Golden, their criticism also flattens the imagined past he conjures up to buttress "The Price of Admission's" claims that modern discrimination in schooling is a historical aberration.
Golden's naïveté about the power elite's roots and endurance should not stop you from reading his scathing indictment of upper-crust universities' admission policies. It is important to know that the peerless University of California system is failing to admit highly qualified Asian Americans and make room for talented African Americans and Hispanics. It's fair game as well to point out how Big Money alumni can buy their children's acceptance to Harvard, Duke and Notre Dame. That well-intentioned congressional reforms to make such practices illegal have gained absolutely no legislative traction is worthy of note (and you'll never guess which special-interest groups have aggressively opposed such measures!).
And then there are the students who were rejected by Top Ten schools despite extraordinary qualifications. They feel frustrated, even embittered. So do their parents. "It was just devastating," Henry Parks' mother confided. "Korean Americans have to do a lot better than Caucasians to get admitted, and it's probably the same for other Asians." Life is not fair, and Golden ably tallies some of its individual injustices.
But he errs in so thoroughly embracing his angered subjects' weird (because uninformed) perspective of the American educational landscape. They, like he, assume that there are only a handful of brand-name institutions that ensure future success. The outcome? Applications to the Ivies have skyrocketed. When, predictably, so many more now are turned away, and end up at what they write off as second-tier schools such as Johns Hopkins University, Emory or the University of Chicago, Golden feels their pain.
Yet his anguish strikes a false note. The Harvard-educated and well-traveled journalist knows there are innumerable stellar universities beyond the gilded cage of the northeastern corridor, many of which are located in what parents and students dismiss as "fly-over country." Why doesn't Golden challenge the provinciality of his subjects and readers? Because doing so would undercut his calculated use of youthful dismay to shore up his powerful, if unreflective, analysis of academic trophy-hunting.
Had he linked his informants' myopia to the corrosive corporatization of American culture, and to the yawning gap between the rich and the poor, and asserted that these are the logical outcomes of more than 200 years of educational inequity, I'd have been more persuaded by "The Price of Admission."
I'd also have been shocked.
Char Miller teaches history and urban studies at Trinity University, and is author of "Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism" and "Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas."
San Antonio Express-News publish date Nov. 5, 2006
Online at: http://www.mysanantonio.com/entertainment/books/stories/MYSA110506.9P.book.admission.c13ff8.html